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Thirty years ago, Thompson's career as a playwright kicked off in the 80-seat Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace with the premiere of The Crackwalker . Though most of the country's theatre companies would now love to premiere a play by Thompson, Canada's dark lady of drama is back at the Backspace this week with her new show, Such Creatures , a pair of interwoven monologues – one delivered by a woman visiting Auschwitz, the other by a 15-year-old girl waiting in the park for a gang of girls set on destroying her. Here's a quick look at Thompson's journey:

1980 Thompson, 25, premieres her gritty first play, The Crackwalker , set in Kingston, Ont., where she grew up, and inspired by a mentally handicapped woman she met during a summer job as a social worker with adult protective services. However, it is only two years later, in an ecstatically reviewed production at Centaur Theatre in Montreal, the city of Thompson's birth, that the play and its creator fully get their due.

1984 Thompson wins her first Governor's General's Award for White Biting Dog , a play that is her first stab at magic realism (the hero is saved from suicide by a talking dog) and the beginning of a long, fruitful partnership with Toronto's Tarragon Theatre. She would receive her second GG five years later for her play collection The Other Side of the Dark .

1990 Lion in the Streets , in which the ghost of a murdered girl tracks down her killer, premieres in a production directed by Thompson herself as part of the World Stage theatre festival in Toronto. It wins the Chalmers Award, but does not, as far as we know, inspire Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones .

1997 After a period of writing for radio, film and TV, and paying her mortgage, Thompson returns to the theatre with Sled , a mystical, murder-filled drama set in Toronto and up north. The idea for Sled came to her while cross-country skiing in Algonquin Park at dusk. The original draft was seven hours long – one for each year she'd spent not writing for the stage – but it eventually clocked in at three.

2000 Lost and Delirious , Thompson's adaptation of Susan Swan's novel The Wives of Bath , hits the screen, directed by Léa Pool. Set at an all-girls' boarding school, it stars a pre- OC Mischa Barton, Piper Perabo and Jessica Paré. It is largely remembered for the steamy love scene between the latter two.

2007 With Palace of the End , a triptych of monologues about individuals affected by the Iraq War, Thompson becomes the first Canadian to win the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, established in 1978 for English-language women playwrights. The prize included $20,000 (U.S.) and a print by Willem de Kooning. The searing play is subsequently performed around the world and also nabs an Amnesty International award in Edinburgh.

2010 After loosening her bond with Tarragon at the end of the 1990s and subsequently premiering plays at Toronto theatres big ( Habitat at Canadian Stage Company) and small ( Enoch Arden at The Theatre Centre), Thompson now finds herself back at the tiny Backspace for Such Creatures , a choice made on artistic grounds. Says Thompson: “You never get too big for the Backspace.”